Topic

proposals

A collection of 120 issues

Name That Project

A company I’ve recently worked with had a load of consultants in. They were delivering some new procurement processes. They’d named each project with a snappy TLA (three-letter-acronym) each with the number 2 in the middle. It’d had become a bit of a running gag to mention

Sequoia Capital Sustainability

[http://www.sequoiacap.com] There can be few more fabled venture capitalists than this crew. Check their CrunchBase [http://www.crunchbase.com/financial-organization/sequoia-capital] and Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_Capital] profiles for evidence. As of now, their assertion estimating that “14% of the NASDAQ’s value is

Colour Blocks

[http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/galleries/TMG8848046/1/Whats-the-colour-of-fashion.html] Here’s a link as it appeared in The Telegraph the other day which caught my eye. If you click through, it seems plenty of haute couture names associate themselves with a specific colour. I was particularly taken with the

Passion Before Reason

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume] At the start of my second ever day of sales training, the old sage conducting affairs wrote up on a flip chart the following teaser; the decision to buy is ____% emotional and it was open forum to fill in the blank with a

Clear Your Written Fog

How glowing is your prose? Once you’ve spent ages over your latest Proposal, is it actually readable? You can easily and quickly check. I was reminded recently of the Fog Index. Impressively, the wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning_fog_index] page on this is unusually digestible. Which

Calorie Counting Optimism Bias

[https://salespodder.com/content/images/wordpress/2011/09/london-pub-burger-14july08.jpg] Plenty of news coverage these past few days has gone to McDonalds now publishing their menus with calories on. As someone who weaned himself off a need for daily burgers and chips in my youth yet still partial to the

A Tweetable Definition

Relax, this is not a blog post commanding or even imploring you to take up tweeting. I am though very much an advocate of the brevity it requires permeating through the sales arena. Not quite with all of the text speak and grammatical liberties mind you. A while ago I

Orwell Clarity

Arh. Those were the days. Slaving over a Proposal the size of a phone book. Crafting a bespoke five page letter to qualify a new prospect. Nowadays ‘message exchange’ can be remarkably abrupt. I’m not advocating a return to the old days. Replete with physical folders half-a-forest full of

Harvard MBA B-Plan Judge Tips

I occasionally blog on the murky world of business plans for two main reasons. I often get paid to help write them so have live exposure to their vagaries and I think many a pitch or proposal (especially a brand new product one) can benefit from lessons learned in this

Your Proposal Yes Page

I did chuckle when I saw this. One of the 37 signals guys came across this terrific attempt by a toll-booth operator to make their life easier [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2799-how-an-illinois-rest-stop-inspired-a-web-page#extended] . They simply typed up 18 questions. They must have been driven bananas by hearing them so